Brain Drain - Hochschule der Bundesagentur für Arbeit

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Introduction
The training of counsellors for the particular challenges of working in the field of Brain
Drain and Brain Gain must take into account, on top of the inalienable
methodological and ethical standards of individual counselling, market policy,
economic policy and political aspects of migration. Hence there exists a great need
for future development of competences in international career guidance.
We also detect an urgent need for a change in the perspective of guidance: away
from guidance that is almost exclusively focused on the individual towards
counselling with a more pronounced emphasis on social inclusion. Furthermore,
mobility counselling has to address migration policy issues. Obviously, this also
implies new responsibilities for the countries of origin in order to aid the reduction of
possible negative effects of brain drain through active involvement in “brain
circulation”.
The OECD points out that return flows inherent to brain circulation may in any case
not lead to an equivalent transfer of knowledge (2008). Skills and knowledge are
crucially linked to the environment of local markets, and the inability of those
environments to harness the competences of returning workers, will result in
extremely ambivalent outcomes. In the EU “brain circulation” may become a shortterm
phenomenon with a trend towards more temporary and circular migration, with
the family remaining behind in a given country of origin and the worker commuting
internationally.
An important field of activity for transnational vocational counselling concerns the
optimal matching of the mobile workers to the new jobs. Especially for SME and for
those workers who are temporarily mobile, it is crucial to reduce the amount of time
that employees take to reach their former productivity.
Another area of counselling arises from the increasing weighting of the skills’ levels in
the immigration policies of some destination countries with many trying to improve
the qualification of the foreign population through targeted immigration. Hence
transnational career guidance will have to stress this point at an early stage to those
clients who want to be internationally mobile.
Therefore the knowledge the counsellor has of mutual recognition of qualifications,
especially of EQF, ECVET and ECTS is a very important precondition for effective
transnational counselling.
On the background of looming important demographic changes, there is currently, at
the highest political level, a lively debate going on in Germany regarding the negative
consequences of the „wasted competences“ caused by the failure to recognize the
qualifications of migrants and their substandard employment. The ‚Bundesagentur für
Arbeit’ (BA) is currently looking into setting up ‚recognition counselling’ in order to put
an end to this situation.
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